Kasama

Last year, Kasama opened this discussion of a central question of revolution in the U.S.: how to understand the structural basis for racist oppression, the relationship of capitalism and racism, and  the relative political  backwardness of white people.

The discussion started with an appraisal of the work of J. Sakai, an influential contemporary communist thinker on the liberation of people of color in the U.S.

The exchange then moved into a look at the “race traitor” school of Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev. And then it ended with a critical glimpse at Harry Haywood’s embrace of comintern-era theory on Black liberation.

We think the important question is how to move off this initial critique toward new communist strategy around the anti-racist struggle for liberation within this prison-house of peoples.

Moderator note: We are reposting comments of  that discussion — without chopping them down into soundbites. It makes  for one very long post.

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Mike Ely writes:

We need a new and much less blindered theory of nationality in the U.S. — a fresh understanding of its mechanisms, history and dynamics that is closer to reality than the writings drawn from a rather orthodox Marxist-Leninist framework  – i.e. rooted in Lenin and Stalin’s once-path-breaking World War 1 writings on the national question.

The way the discussion of race and nationality has (so often and so simplistically) been reduced (among some currents of communist) to “are they a nation or not,” — (are Chicanos a nation? are Native peoples actually nations? Are African Americans a nation or a nationality? and so on). There is a parallel dismissal of any discussion of cultural autonomy and community control. In some communist currents, vision and politics have been trapped within dualities of of assimilation or secession — or remained confined to formulations (and verdicts) drawn from turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe. This backward-looking rigidity  has placed an  awful constraint on thought around the most central questions of revolution in the U.S. New academic work (emerging from many explorations of identity and racism) has often gone unengaged and the theoretical discussion among revolutionaries has remained impoverished.

It shouldn’t be so shocking to say (among communists) that there are issues of race and color-line from the early development of the U.S. that can’t simply be reduced to the forging of an oppressed nation in the period of Reconstruction’s betrayal. The way the words “race” and “racism” have often been banned from the Maoist press (or dismissed with a simple nonsequitor “race is not a biological and therefore not a scientific category”) is simplistic in a profoundly anti-theoretical way that doesn’t even consider the existing arguments or bases for opposing views.

The argument of “no American exceptionalism” in the international communist movement after the late 1920s became a banner for dogmatically denying the particularity of contradiction. I don’t know what our verdicts should be on Gramsci or Mariategui, but I do know from rereading those early communists (and their analysis of Italian fascism and Peruvian society respectively) that they made living analyses of real contradictions in a way we haven’t seen (or been allowed to do) with respect to the U.S. (including on the related questions of nationality in the U.S. or the dangers of fascism.)

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Nil writes:

Coming from an anarchist millieu and deeply suspicious of communists, it was personally an intellectually shocking experience to run into J. Sakai’s Settlers (published in 89 I believe) and False Nationalism, False Internationalism (early 80s, I believe).

The latter in particular focusing on a scientific examination of revolutionary organizations, but both of them blowing me away with the intensity, seriousness, intellectual honesty and commitment, and brilliance of their analyses. And by self-proclaimed _Maoists_, it was shocking to me at the time reading them (late 90s), associating Maoism with, well, honestly, RCP members and fellow travellers who I had known or worked with and did not have such a good opinion of. I don’t know enough about Avakian to say what he did or didn’t contribute.

But I know it was reading those books, from Maoists as far as I know unconnected with the RCP, that I learned what scientific and materialist analysis of history (including criticism of comrades from a position of solidarity rather than competition) really WAS and that some communists had been doing it all along.

A strength of intellectual engagement that anarchists have a lot to learn from. I still have to say, when recommending these books and others like them to comrades, “Yes, okay, they’re Maoists, but it’s not what you think, really.

Give it a chance.

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Tellnolies writes:

I had a similar experience with both “Settlers” and “False nationalism, False Internationalism.” While I have subsequently become more critical of their positions they made a powerful impression on me as concrete analyses of concrete situations that I never got from reading Avakian, even where I have agreed with him.

Avakian’s appeal to his followers is really as a visionary more than as a rigorous analyst of social reality. He is good at laying out a vision of a communist society that somehow or other will avoid the pitfalls of previous experiences and he is also good at cooking up the apocalyptic consequences of failure to pursue his vision, whether its is WW3 or Christian Fascism. But these are more impressionistic speculations than rigorous analyses.

It is when examined closely that the dilletantism really comes out.

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Mike Ely writes on Sakai’s shredding of  populist (“volkish”) views of American history:

I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing on American history, and particular on the struggle of Black people from slavery to now… And as part of that, I have studied Sakai’s work and method closely — and learned a lot from reading and rereading Settlers in particular.

His is a searing and needed refutation of populist CPUSA history (Anthony Bimba to Leo Huberman to Phil Foner to William Foster) where the U.S. is portrayed as a formation within which the people (as such) square off with the ruling class over and over. This whole historical view and method (and its corresponding political lines) negates the settler-state origins of the U.S. — and the ways those origins still impact U.S. life and politics. It denies (or downplays) stratification, layers of corruption, deception and inclusion — and it denies the real history of class and race in America.

This populist view (often passing as Marxist) was always tied to a shameful blindspot toward the genocide of Native people (and even defacto support in various ways). Just read Leo Huberman’s We the People! This was tied (of course) to the politics of the times and movement that produced the Communist Party USA — a left culture which repeatedly tailed the “volkish” aspects of white people (“This land is your land, this land is my land…”)

It is a pull similar to the one now slapping Obama — i.e. “you can’t, you mustn’t offend THIS self-conception of the America (its goodness, its progressiveness, its unity etc.) if you want to stand upright within this political arena.”

Now I appreciated this work (Settlers) without agreeing with its central thesis (i.e. that there has not been a multinational working class, and that white people of all classes were simply oppressors throughout their history).

The U.S. started as a white settler and slave state — but it became a capitalist state (and an imperialist one) where the contradictions became even more complex and intertwined.

I learned from Sakai’s work without embracing its method (which involves some cherry picking of history to serve its thesis — including its discussion of the struggles among coal miners that I have some direct experience with.)

I have had a far less favorable view of “False Internationalism” — which is not a work of history, but a polemical argument against multinational revolutionary organization, an argument that I believe we must emphatically reject, along with its negative interpretation of Black Panther alliances with white radicals etc.

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Mike Ely on  the “race traitor” school:

I think there is a lot to understand about the “creation of the white race” and the ways in which imperialism has allowed (and compelled) the dominant culture (and assumptions) to expand what is included in the dominant, forged nationality within a highly multinational U.S.

And it is remarkable and revealing, that the RCP never discussed, debated, appreciated or refuted the discoveries of Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev (and the larger school of “race traitor” thinking) — which some of us read on personal time.

In fact, it is stunning how little theory Maoists in the U.S. have produced around the understanding of nationality, race, and immigration in this rapidly changing multinational state. It has been frozen in the framework that emerged from the debates of 60s and in some ill-fitting concepts borrowed whole from the international communist movement.

This is not an argument (from me) for rejecting Maoist dialectics or Marxist materialism — but (on the contrary!) an argument for snatching our communist theory from a superficial and dilletantist dogmatism that veers far from the actual methods of a Marx, a Lenin or a Mao (even when, as tellnolies puts it, we might tend to agree with some of the verdicts and arguments, in the absence of something else.)

In a century, the dominant, defining, favored, normative “American” nationality has gone from being WASPs (i.e. English and German descended protestants, with tacit acknowledgement of the Irish in major cities) — to white people more generally (as Jews and Italians etc were included) — to honorary-if-contradictory status within a dominant nationality in some ways extended to sections of some “non-white” peoples — like Japanese-Americans, some people of multi-racial background, Chicanos in some areas, Texanos, Cuban Americans in Florida etc. I suspect that the dominant nationality remains the “white race” in many ways (and many places) but it is changing in other ways and places. with all the contradictions of that (both for the mainstream politics and for the revolutionary politics).

This is rooted in the system’s reactive needs for stability, and also in the use of color lines (and castelike legal status) to maintain a “real proletariat” within the U.S. class structure. This has intensified as they have forged a new “internalized third world working class” through the undocumented immigration, and as some sections of the oppressed nationalities (the Black p.b. for example) now function more as part of an integrated society than as the “talented tenth” of a segregated Black nation.

We can’t understand Obama (who he is and what he represents in the historic development of politics in this place) without understanding all this much better. Just saying “Jesse Jackson (or King or Obama or Colin Powell) is a representative of U.S. imperialism not the oppressed Black nation” –these are is (whether the verdicts are formally correct or incorrect) just phrases substituted for a living analysis.

The Black nation (forged in the deep Southern slave states) has now been dispersing from those rural areas for over a hundred years. First the urbanization of African American people and then the repeal of legal segregation (and break down of some social segregation for some Black people) have shaped that dispersal. Many millions of Black people remain bitterly segregated (in someways more intensely within impoverished enclaves than before the 60s). African American people as a whole face racist oppression (as do other “non-white” nationalities in distinctive and interrelated ways). But, at the same time, there have been changes — including the development of new forms of multi-culturalism and “race mixing” (in places like Californian cities and NYC) that need to be much more deeply investigated and understood.

We need to look at this fresh — and not just at new conditions, but with a sharp critical eye at the slightly modified “classic ML” approach to the national question (that always had a highly contradictory ability/inability to grasp the realities we are seeking to transform). The assumptions and instincts of 60s Black nationalism are exhausted in many ways. The issues of secession for the Black belt have only of the most tenuous relevance to any modern discussion. The U.S. has become a far more complexly multinational country because of the influx of Latin American and Asian immigrants — creating new conditions and new possibilities.

One thing I believe deeply: we need to draw out off all this a profoundly multinational revolutionary movement that is profoundly opposed to racial oppression. Both parts of that are crucial and difficult. And if it happens it will be a highly contradictory real-life process filled with different currents (including necessarily movements rooted in particular nationalities against their particular oppressions — including now with the demand for legality for the undocumented peoples.)

We need to understand what capitalism has been transforming, and what only socialist revolution can transform. And we have to break with old thinking and frozen theory to even start to consider these matters.

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Saoirse writes:

Reading Settlers and False Nationalism, False Internationalism shook me up as a younger activist. I still respect there contributions and encourage people to read them.

That said I tend to see both as having a habit of cherrypicking history and subsitituting moralism for rigorious argumentation when they see fit to prove the central thesis that white people of all classes were simply oppressors throughout their history.

Looking at the orientation of the authors and practice of organizations that take such lit as foundational documents can be illustrative of my point.

Look no further than MIM and Weather.

[Moderator note: the Maoist Internationalist Movement and the pro-Weather group Prairie Fire were among the most energetic promoters of Sakai's theories on the non-existance of a "white proletariat."]

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Mike Ely writes:

As part of the research i did for the “Blacks and Jews: a Revolutionary View” piece, I did a careful study of the Nation of Islam’s book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews Vol. 1. And I expected the book (which focuses on Jewish participation in African slavery) to be just a pile of false assertions. In fact, it was filled with real data… and some of it was interesting about the role that certain Sephardic Jewish families had in creating the modern slave North American trade (by moving from South America to the British colonial east coast) etc. And in its discussion of Jewish people in the Confederacy etc.

But it was an outrageous anti-semitic work because of its method of cherrypicking — combing the history of enslaved Africans to uncover every place Jewish people made an appearance. And after extracting those data bits (from the overall context) you could create a picture where it SEEMED as if the slave trade was run by Jews. In fact it wasn’t… it was a slave trade by European merchant capitalists (and feudals), largely Christian of course, among whom were (not all that many) Jewish participants. And there were huge parts of the historical picture left out (including the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africans focused in East AFrica, but also including the role of Jewish people in the war against slavery, in the civil rights struggle, in abolitionism etc.)

And I don’t want to compare Sakai with Farrakhan (for many reasons) — but there was an element where his book Settlers extracted (in vivid and important ways) every occassion where the struggle of Black people in the U.S. was opposed (or betrayed) by “white workers” (or trade unions, or multinational socialist/communist movement).

It is an important record — that had largely been written out by the Foner/Foster’s self-serving  “political truths” (as I mentioned elsewhere). But it was partial, and its partial nature allowed it to be presented as proof of a false theory (i.e. that there is no multinational proletariat, and that white working people have simply presented themselves in history as oppressors.)

It is true, and needs to be understood, that the trade union movement in the U.S. was never just a movement for the protection and improvement of worker wages and conditions. There was always a major element where the trade union goals were the RESTRICTION OF THE LABOR MARKET — which often meant support Asian exclusion and Jim Crow exclusion of Black people. The notorious racist outlook of the skilled trades in the twentieth century was the general outlook of trade unions in the 19th century (with the exception of the United Mine Workers — which is why Sakai has to focus on that to affirm his thesis.) The workers movement of the Western states (i.e. California, Sierra Nevada miners, etc) was born (in many ways) as a racist anti-Asian political (and even pogromist) movement (far more than as a combat organization of struggle against employers).

So I think Sakai uncovered and documented very important sides to the U.S. (and the nature of “the people” in this complex place)… but at the same time, you can’t get at the OVERALL truth (in its complexity and contradiction) without an overall view.

Finally, I think it is important that scientific theories are developed by the induction method — where people start with a theory, and then marshal the data, and then they (or others) uncover what data doesn’t fit the theory. Sakai has done this. And it is a contribution. The fact that there is data that “doesn’t fit” does not make his theories a crime (or dishonesty). It is all part of the process by which we refine and develop our insights. (And, overall, his theories are raising data that doesn’t fit the populist CPUSA distortions of history — and it is part of the scientific process from that side to.)

I think we can learn from Gould who sees even the incorrect theories put forward during the scientific process as part of how the truth develops. We should not assume (or dwell on) the motives of those putting forward flawed theories — and assume that they are (consciously) agents of falsehood. This approach (which flowered in the Stalin-era comintern) treats errors of theory and politics as proof of “alien thinking” and sinister intent — and quickly moves toward treating opponents as criminals (not as partners in a complex struggle for the truth).

Just as I learned from Sakai’s refutation of the CPUSA’s historical verdicts, I think we could all benefit by critically examining Sakai’s work, and developing a more dialectical understanding of how a working class emrged from a settler state, and how it became multinational, and how the lines of nationality entwined with stratification and divergent interests, and also ways and places where that was overcome. (The wobblies is one interesting place to look but there are other examples.)

And it is a question of levels of interest. In a related thread Rosa Lichtenstein comments that it is a mystery to her why any of us would use the expression “false consciousness.” I agree — though my argument doesn’t rest on whether or not Marx used (or embraced) the concept. It is because i think the notion of “false consciousness” posits a linear connection between “thinking and being” — and has an undialectical view of being (that doesn’t allow for complex experience, and conflicted interests in various classes.)

That was, in part, the point of my essay Linc and Me: On the material basis of incorrect ideas.

[Since this discussion we have published a longer essay on the contradictions between white and African American coal miners -- called "Ambush at Keystone #1."]

To put it less anecdotally. it is not the case that working people have one simple and clear and monolithic set of “interests” (to which a particular set of theories, programs and ideas correspond and which could then be labeled “true consciousness”) or that all other ideas belong to a category of “false consciousness” because they “don’t correspond” to those class interests.

Just one simple example: Working people (by the nature of capitalism) are attempting to sell a commodity (individual labor power). And as such, meet and confront others of their class as competitors in the labor market. This is objective, and gives rise to all kinds of ideas (largely backward ideas of serving self or “my group” over other sections of the workers.) Every time a worker asks “how do we keep our jobs at home” or “how do we stop immigrants from taking our jobs” — Similar ideas are in play when workers “suck up,” or “snitch,” scab on each other, oppose affirmative action, or support tarrifs on trade. This is not simply “false consciousness” but it is an internalization of the competitive divisions created by capitalism rooted in the workers’ position as highly individualized sellers of a commodity. It is rooted in the ways workers think they have common cause with “their” employers selling “their” products on the world market to protect “their” jobs.

And there are different interests that arise from the ability to suppress competition through the struggle and attainment of certain reforms — so that workers can develop a sense of common purpose and common cause in the demand for standardized wages, seniority systems, a solidarity that rejects scabbing. These interests are in complex relationship with the “my group” mentality — since the solidarity of workers in one industry or country can coexist with their acceptance of conflict with other workers (in other trades, or countries or whatever.)

Sakai takes apart the example of Southern coal miners in the U.S. (in the 1970s in a movement i saw personally) opposing the importation of South African coal. This was done in the name of opposing apartheid, and boycotting goods from South Africa (and so was promoted in many corners of the Left as a breakthrough example of “black and white” workers uniting against racism.) But as Sakai digs into, it was never clear if this was really coming from a place of solidarity and anti-racism, or a place of “buy American” (i.e. protecting U.S. coal prices and jobs from imported coal from the third world).

There clearly WERE workers (both Black and white) who were involved for internationalist reasons, and who raised their own consciousness about imperialism in the process. But the situation was far more complex (including certainly in the miners union officials of the Southern gulf coast who gave their support to this movement).

And then, beyond these contradictions, there are other (”higher”) interests at play, of course, that correspond to the possibility of abolishing class society — where working people have common global interests in revolutionary movement and self-sacrifice. How we uncover this, how we encourage it, how it relates to the other forms of solidarity that emerge spontaneously (from their lives as workers in conflict with capitalists and market competition) is an issue we need to uncover.

Part f what we need to dig into is the treatment and evolution of the concept “proletariat” or “working class” within the international communist movement. Because there is a process by which it goes from being a description of actual workers acting as a class on the political landscape (largely in the European context before WW2) to being a far more abstracted concept that ultimately often means little different than a communist line or party. It is worth taking a close look at Mao’s long march in china and grappling with the question of “Does this long march represent an event of proletarian revolution? And if so, how exactly? By what levels of mediation, abstraction and representation?”

By the time we get to the RCP of today, “proletarian leadership” of the united front means little more or less than leadership by their party, which is simply assumed to objectively represent both proletarian ideas and proletarian interests, with or without actual workers, with or without concrete proof. This is one of the places where the “classic” phrases and assumptions seem rather exhausted — stretched to the limits of their current usage by big changes in society.

In short, we need to revisit the historical processes and mediations by which “tools speak through humans” (as Mao jokingly put it) — the process by which the historically developing contradictions between rising forces of production and increasingly outmoded relations of production) give rise to class struggles that have the potential for a new social order, and the process by which that potential (and its intellectual recognition) gives rise to ideas that “objectively correspond” to the “higher interests” of a particular class within global society.

That question of how a specific part (class) in society becomes the agency of objectively posed changes and how the ideas that correspond to that emerge and come to lead…. is something we need to return to, and dig into afresh.

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Saoirse writes:

Tellnolies, you may be correct in arguing that Sakai’s “central thesis is that the compromised nature of settler society prevented the emergence of a ‘white proletariat.’” Though the subtitle of the book is “the Mythology of the White Proletariat,” the banner quote “the true story of the white nation” certainly say something about how the theory was sold (more on this further). Although as you acknowledge I tend to see FN, FI, Settlers and Bottomfish Blues as a ideological package embodying a developing politic. And by the way didnt Settlers come first?

I guess my question here is twofold:

• If they are not proletariat than what are they?
• and how do we understand and engage “bread and butter” white working class issues or whatever we want to call them?

MIM certainly has a practice. Race Traitor has a practice. Prairie Fire does as well. Some organizations have more nuanced politics on these questions as well as better approaches in organizing.

I do agree that Sakai’s work is viewed best as a corrective to the rose colored glasses of CPUSA history’s of the US working class. Settlers is certainly the deepest work and deserves our attention. However as much as it serves as a corrective it never struck me as balanced.

Call me an idealist (or dancing in the romance of the politics of hope) I hasten to throw out the baby with the bath water.

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Tellnolies writes:

I think there are two ways of reading the claim that there isn’t a “white proletariat”:

The most common and the one that I think Sakai encourages is that white workers can be largely disregarded as a potential revolutionary force.

The second one that I’ve come around to is the view that white workers must be won to viewing themselves as members of the multinational proletariat if they are to become a revolutionary force. this means more than “Black and White, Unite and Fight” though. It means a recognition of the reactionary nature of white privilege and racial identity.

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Nil writes:

The “Settlers” perspectives is that the u.s. white working class is a ‘labor aristocracy’. A category which was introduced by Marx and Engels. But. One of the parts of the developing “Settlers” perspective is that class analysis can not stop with Marx and Engels, because class formation and re-formation did not stop a hundred years ago (and over the past 100 years was not the same everywhere; although it increasingly comes to be now with ‘globalization’).

For a Settlers-grouping analysis of contemporary class formations addressing the labor aristocracy, (which, among other things, takes gender into account much more than Settlers did, as Sakai and others have generally done since then), see: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/texts/notebooks.html

For an interview with Sakai done 10 years (or more? there’s no date on it) after Settlers, revisiting some of the themes from Settlers but to some extent correcting some mis-perceptions (or over-statements, depending on how you want to look at it): http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/raceburn.html

In particular, on the lack of a white proletariat in the u.s. and what that means:

“Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants. But it isn’t a proletariat. It isn’t the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. .. It never occurs to anyone to believe that the metropolitan middle classes are going to overthrow the system that privileges them. No one says, “The white doctors and professors and managers are the revolutionary class.” Yet, without any big fuss or posturing, middle-class radicals just organize in those classes when and where they can, all around themselves. Students just form issue groups in even the most elite universities. Teachers try to open minds to social justice, while even some doctors volunteer to serve in refugee camps or argue with the majority of their criminal profession about being healers not rip-offs or stock market addicts. For better or worse, success or defeat. No big political deal, it’s just living the life, the meal that’s set before us.

“But when it comes to the working classes, whoa, then it’s all this ideological ca-ca. To believe what we’re told, no one should want to organize or educate workers unless they can be sure that the entire class is “bound for glory” as the main force for revolution! (which you won’t see here in this lifetime, trust me). So the white workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer—which they aren’t unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors—or they’re like ignorant scum you wouldn’t waste your time on. Small wonder rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the left…. If radicalism can build small counter-currents of liberation in the overwhelmingly corrupt middle classes, why should similar work be questioned in the white working class communities? What i am fighting is the slick “Marxist” or “anarchist” opportunism, which sees aligning with the white settler majority and reform politics as the absolute necessity.”

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Jaroslav writes:

So Mike, what are these other methods you allude to besides Stalin’s?

There is what I call the ‘CNN method’, by which state power = nationhood, which is to say that if you don’t have state power you’re not really a nation, & when you do get state power somehow you’re magically declared a nation on CNN (e.g. Kosovo, East Timor). Obviously this is just status-quo-ism, along with a dose of historical revisionism when the status quo changes.

Then there is the ‘I’m a nation, you’re a nation, everybody’s a nation method’, by which any social grouping can be considered a nation which deserves independence, whether it’s a native group with 3 remaining survivors or some modern localist construct like ‘Cascadia’. This just helps out the imperialists attempts at divide & conquer.

Then there is ‘Stalin’s 5 points method’, which I find to be overall correct, but having some problems. I don’t claim to have worked out better solutions, but from looking at the objective state of the world, I think he has dogmatically set the bar too high.

Both the positive & negative aspects of his approach are to be found in this concept of ‘capability’ (which I do not equate with ‘deserving’ just because I mention both of them nearby each other). The positive aspect is that this is a perfectly materialist approach, which will prevent silly attempts of artificial ‘nation’-building. But the negative aspect is that historical reality shows that there are plenty of viable states & economies which are not run by ‘nations’ as defined by Stalin’s criteria. In fact, there may even be a kernel of truth to the ‘CNN method’ in that some nations havebecome nations exactly through the process of running a state. The ruling classes of the settler states like US/Canada Euroamericans, Afrikaaners, Israelis, were decidedly not nations in Stalinist sense when they began their bloody rule, but this didn’t make them any less ‘capable’ of ruling, & of coalescing into nations through such rule.

So what about under socialism? Obviously we want to do away with national oppression, but do we really want to do away with national distinctions, which seems to be the ‘traditional Marxist attitude’ towards the question? Is the ‘bigger is better’ principle really true? That is, is the best way to get to communism to have large multinational socialist states, or would it be better in some circumstances to have more medium-sized socialist states, also multinational but not quite as ‘multi’…? For example in the USSR, originally the Central Asia was a federation separate from the rest of USSR, but they joined together (keeping autonomy) under this ‘bigger is better’ principle. Was that the best course of action? More importantly, would it be the best course of action in the future ex-US?

If new nations can develop out of non-nation groupings under capitalism, can’t this also happen under socialism? Again, this is normally viewed as a fusing of the multinational milieu which finds itself in possession of a socialist state power, but why should it be ‘the more the merrier’?

Also, Stalin’s definition is specifically for capitalism. He specifically contrasts ‘modern nation’ to the social bases of ruling classes of feudal & slave states.

So, especially in regard to Native Americans / First Nations, we can see how this is objectively in line with (regardless of whatever Stalin’s subjective wishes may have been, or even of the great practise carried out in national question in USSR) the Eurocentric view of ‘Progress’, wherein the ‘proper’ sequence of development will land the ‘capable’ nation into a position of having a capitalist economy, & then the revolutionary view (the ‘progressive’ view?) is to build socialism around this same nation, part of which is to remedy all the wrongs caused by this nation’s path of development.

Let’s talk about treaties. The treaties were a legal concession by the US, that objectively in practise recognise the Native Americans with whom they made treaties to be sovereign nations. As everyone knows, the US swindled & coerced so that they are unfair treaties, & broke them anyway despite their unfairness. The ’sovereignty’ has been steadily but not slowly ground away. On average only about 25% of the land on reservations, which are themselves pitiful remainders of former territories, are actually owned by Natives. The maximum penalties which Native authorities can dole out are something like $5000 & 2 years in prison, & even this can only be for members of their own tribe for acts taking place on the reservation itself. Anyway, without rambling on about all the injustices, the point is that the US, as in many other aspects, is violating its own laws; nonetheless on paper they recognise the sovereignty. Therefore if a revolutionary state were to actually say ‘you are not nations’, this would be a step backwards in national equality, failing to recognise even on paper sovereignty which was previously recognised at the international level. And I do not think it adequate to use excuse of ‘US imperialists signed those treaties, we’re not them, we’re the proletariat’ or something to that effect.

I have to get going, but here’s a final thought. Under socialism we are (if we do it right) not going to have nationaloppression, regardless of who gets ‘nation’ status or independence or autonomy; we will not be having forced exoduses regardless of which ‘nation’ gets ‘control’ of which piece of land. So why not then foster the further development of the Native peoples, why not give them prominence over their former lands. Why not, for example, in a stage-wise manner let Native languages become the official languages which everyone will speak in school? [....]

With that segue, let me get into this definition of nationhood thing some more.

The world in 1913 (& the decades immediately preceding) which is surely what Stalin had to base his analysis on, was very different than the world today in important ways. It isn’t fundamentally different in the sense that it is still capitalism, still the imperialist stage of capitalism controlled by an extremely small minority of the population of an extremely small minority of the world’s nations/peoples. So we’re talking about nations here. Back then, for the most part it was very clear where a nation stood in the hierarchy. There were only a very few neocolonies (e.g. Thailand), for the most part a country was either independent or it was directly controlled & administered by a colonialist power. Some of the independent countries might be weak, they might be influenced, threatened, & cajoled into doing things; but they were still independent in more than name only. They (well their ruling class anyway, but it was a native ruling class) determined their own political structure, raised their own armies, made their own economic decisions (yes based on considerations benefits & consequences of external origin, but even the imperialists must do this), etc. Whereas today, how could anyone say this about ‘independent countries’ like the Philippines, Uzbekistan, or Namibia? Even Venezuela is at most a neocolony whose local government is currently attempting to become an independent country.

Today’s world presents the biggest problem to the Stalin model in its criteria of common economy, which states (emphasis in original):

“Georgia came on the scene as a nation only in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the fall of serfdom and the growth of the economic life of the country, the development of means of communication and the rise of capitalism, introduced division of labour between the various districts of Georgia, completely shattered the economic isolation of the principalities and bound them together into a single whole. The same must be said of the other nations which have passed through the stage of feudalism and have developed capitalism. Thus, a common economic life, economic cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation.”

…look at the overall method in this section of Stalin’s article: basically he names some groups which are generally accepted as being nations or not being nations, describes the common features of them, & uses this definition to determine whether groups are nations or not. Although I agree with a lot of his conclusions, the method seems a priori & circular.

I agree with Mike wholeheartedly when he says

‘Clearly the goal of revolution is to END the wrongs (not necessarily return to some idealized status quo before capitalism crashed in upon us all).’

So beyond all this ‘academic’ discussion of who’s a nation & who’s not, is how do we end the wrongs.

I have a serious problem with the idea that we can end the wrongs by just being one big common multinational state (as seems to be implied by his next sentence calling ‘to organize a common life’). Neither, of course, do I want a bunch of separate principalities all over the map. I lean more towards having a socialist federation. This is looser than a central state & has a principle of equality between the federation members. A huge chunk — the majority — would most likely be a multinational area with a central state. Also, the national autonomy areas wouldn’t be ethnically cleansed but would also be multinational, simply having a different overall culture (& language) akin to how in a South Asian Soviet Federation the Nepali area would be different from the Bengali area but both would be socialist, & both would participate in creating common plans to be carried out by all.

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Nil writes:

What are the implications of whether a community consitutes a nation or not? Why does it matter? Maybe this is astupid question. But it seems that the _implications_ of whether a community is a nation or not matter for determining the proper criteria for whether they are a nation or not. If this matters.

Mike writes that

“The way the discussion of race and nationality has (so often and so simplistically) been reduced to ‘are they a nation or not,’ — all of that has been an awful constraint on thought around the most central questions of revolution in the U.S.”

First I would point out that discussion of race and nationality only gets reduced to that question within certain doctrinaire communist circles. It certainly is not generally reduced this question within the general population, who would find this statement weird! But the end of Mike’s sentence there suggests that reducing things to that question has a negative impact on our general critical faculty. What if we suggest for the sake of argument that this question doesn’t even matter? What does it matter?

Certainly if there are members of an oppressed community (a community which is understood as a community by both the oppressors and the members of it, and assigned a place in a caste system on those grounds)–and members of that community believe that community to be a nation—who is anyone else to say otherwise? And why does it matter? Unless you are Stalin deciding whether they deserve an autonomous government or should instead have any exhibition of community membership suppressed. Is the latter ever appropriate, regardless of whether a community is ‘really’ a nation? Is the former really about no more and no less than whether the community is ‘really’ a nation? Are either of those questions of importance to us in deciding how to understand and act where we live now?

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Left Spot writes:

For solid historical grounding and analysis of the oppression of Black people in the U.S., Dubois, Baraka
and Haywood are excellent places to start. For reference, there is some material by both Amiri Baraka and by Harry Haywood on the Left Spot Special Collections site. Here’s what you can find by Baraka and Haywood there:

• Harry Haywood: Chapter VII from Harry Haywood’s 1948 book ‘Negro Liberation’
• Documents from Amiri Baraka / League of Revolutionary Struggle (ML):
• Nationalism, Self-Determination and Socialist Revolution by Amiri Baraka, Forward Magazine.
• RWH on the Black Liberation Movement: Wrong Again! By Amiri Baraka, December 1981.
• Revolutionary Communist League on the Afro American National Question (RCL later merged into the LRS)

all the above can be found via this link: http://www.leftspot.com/blog/?q=specialcollections

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Nando writes:

These work suggested by Left Spot have some historical value…. as a record of previous attempts to theoretically understand the situation of Black people. But I think all those works are deeply flawed — they were flawed when they were written, and they are dealing with a historical reality that has changed a great deal since.

Basically the Comintern decided to impose a theoretical construction the world that was developed to deal with Eastern European nations within the Tsarist empire. And in particular, it was thought that Black people in the U.S. had the conditions of internally oppressed nation within a multinational state — so that the theoretical constucts could rather directly be applied.

So African American people were said to have fit the five “criteria of a nation” (set by Stalin in his 1912 analysis of nationalities within the Russian empire and his polemic with those analyzing nationalities within the Austrian empire). And so the political approaches of the Bolsheviks were assumed to carry as well.

There is a lot wrong with this — which has become clearer over time. It has to do with a number of particularities of the existence and developments of the African American people, the settler history of white people in the U.S., and the existence of a “color line” for defining status.

Harry Haywood’s book Negro Liberation is (to put it simply) terrible. As the CPUSA became more and more openly liberal in its politics (together with its embrace of the New Deal and “American Democracy”) this translated directly to a rather crude rapprochement with all kinds of reformist (and even racist) views and practices. And so Haywood’s book (written after WW2) emerged as a repudiation of the CPUSA’s Browderite course, that demanded a return (theoretically) to the assumptions of a “classic” framework and solution to the problems of internally oppressed people in multinational states.

The comintern’s approach to self-determination (i.e. focusing on independence and rejecting forms of cultural self-determination at a community level) was rooted in the existence of a particular national territory where the oppressed people (poles, georgians, etc) had emerged historically as a culture, national market and stable majority. For Black people (who were kidnapped, enforced into a castelike status as slaves and sharecroppers, with little developed class structure in many areas, who always lived in close proximity with white people etc.), these approaches were really crudely applied.

Haywood’s book is a throwback to early comintern theory, wielding it as a weapon against the liberal and backward policies rising to the fore in the CP. In that sense it was commendable (and on some levels more “left”) — but it was really dogmatic and inevitably out of touch with the specific conditions.

W.E.B. DuBois made tremendous contributions to the Black Liberation struggle — but that particular work cited Black Reconstruction is rooted in the idea that there was a single capitalist ruling class in the U.S., and that the Civil War was therefore not fundamentally a revolutionary war against slavery, but a split between different kinds of capitalists. It is filled with important historical information (which were once suppressed and virtually unknown) — but as a model of materialist analysis it is deeply flawed.

One current of people infatuated with this kind of politics took it far to the right, latching their dogma onto an equally problematic infatutuation with American life and democracy. Amiri Baraka (in particular) always had a streak of American nationalism (seeing Blues as a quintessentially American phenom), a singleminded interest in tickering within establishment politics (by electoral and other means) especially at the city level (Newark), and a belief (which we need to radically challenge) that the completion, refinement and extension of bourgeois democracy is a key path to unfolding socialist revolution.

I think people SHOULD read these works, and should critically dissect and debate them. But my belief (after a study of them) is that the represent the kind of thinking we need to move away from, break with.

And there is an eclecticism here too: Carl advocates both Haywood and Ted Allen’s work. Ok. Again, people should read them both. But who can miss that these are incompatible ideological and analytical frameworks?

I agree with the 9 letters (particularly the 9th letter) which call for theoretical work to create “a vibrant new communist coherency” — that coherency can’t emerge by overlooking those kinds of incompatibility. The insights and questions raised by all kinds of work and authors need to be synthesized… but precisely to identify the actual conditions and develop a theory that coherently encompasses that reality.

And finally, I think we have to grapple deeply with changes in the objective situation.

The historic issues around “is this people a nation?” is the question of whether there is a material basis for an existence as an independent country. If there is not material basis for independence (no national market, class structure, common language, historically constituted community etc) then what would be the point of upholding national independence as a political possibility (or “right”)?

Black people WERE in many waged forged as a distinct nation through the experience of slavery, reconstruction and the reversal of reconstruction. They were (obviously) concentrated in the southern black belt — in a territory of majority population.

But that was a long time ago. Black people have not formed a contiguous national territory in almost a century. they have not been a rural people in the deep south for many generations. And there has been a tremendous class differentiation since the 1960s, which is not a class differentiation WITHIN a coherent nation (or national market), but involves some sections of the black middle classes assimilating into the larger society, and sections of the most poor being more and more isolated and impoverished through marginalization from regular work.

These developments affect the degree to which the term “nation” applies to Black people (whether as metaphor or scientific terminology) — and certainly affects the degree to which national independence exists as a viable (or potentially popular) solutions.

National independence (”Free the Land”) has always been a marginalized demand, which had very little attraction among Black people. It simply is not the cutting edge of their struggle or demands, and does not appear to most people to offer a solution to the intense problems of inequality and exploitation that African American people face. It was a real diversion when some radical forces got infaturated with independence (whether among communists in the 1930s, or among PanAfricanists in the 1960s).

The demand for “self-determination” raised by people who felt independence was NOT the best solution was a convoluted, and abstracted exercise in loyalty to “Leninism”, while being disloyal to the creative spirit of Lenin (and those like him).

All of this is very old, very irrelevant. Reading these particular works has some historical interest — especially as we break with such approaches. but presenting them as a valuable starting place is to suggest we return to exactly the cell we are trying to escape from.

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Big L writes:

This is one of the most important tasks for anyone serious about “reconceiving”or “regrouping” any type of militant marxist movement. One of the best critiques of the Black Nation thesis, which touches on many of the points folks raise here, can be found here.

That piece was collectively written in the 70’s, but very much led by little-known marxist Harry Chang – who was extremely influential with folks such as Omi & Winant. (Check out an article on him here)

In addition, the works of Adolph Reed Jr., Theodore Allen, and E. San Juan jr., represent some of the best marxist analysts from the academy dealing with the race/class nexus. Most of the stuff I’ve read from these folks has been off of places like JSTOR, so I can’t post any at the moment, but will try to locate some PDFs.

I’m working on writing an inquiry into this question with some folks, so any other suggestions would be very much appreciated.

[Moderator note: since Big L wrote this a discussion around Harry Chang's thesis and communist theory on race  has emerged on the Advance the Struggle blog.]

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Mike Ely writes:

On the issues being discussed:

There was a major problem in the Third International of overestimating the “universality” of insights developed so successfuly during the Russian revolution. Zinoviev was one of the forces at the center of that. Under his leadership of the comintern the Soviet experience was turned into a model of thinking and doing, of analysis and organization.

This was a complex process — and there was a great heavy weight of social democratic gradualism and parlimentarism that the Bolshevik experience helped overthrow. There as a great deal of value in forming a COMMUNIST current out of these cataclysmic events (in which significant sections of workers in Europe became consciously revolutionary, and after which colonial people around the world were ‘awakened’ to the possibility of taking the socialist road).

However….

There was a whole element of assuming the “universal” character of key things. As if the “form” had been discovered: soviets as a form, insurrection as a form, the bolshevik party distilled as a form, Marxism-leninism as a finished ideology and so on.

so the process of popularization and struggle for a more revolutionary approach went over to codify whatever was the current line of the CPSU(B). And (needless to say, perhaps) the concept of the “Leninist Party” enshrined by Zinoviev in the 28 points was not the same as the process by which the Bolshevik Party emerged and operated… since the Bolsheviks had a living process of development, that changed over time (not a single model that popped out of Lenin’s head and was implemented).

On the national question:

the socialists of the U.S. had a long history of coexistance between indifferent neglect to black people and open white racism. Black people were considered backward, difficult to organize, inclined toward scabbing in union project, and peripheral to what “really’ mattered (i.e. the industrial movements of the overwhelmingly white and immigrant workers). When some Black workers started to organize (sleeping car porters, etc.) they were reluctantly included in the circle of socialist concerns…

but the existence of a horrific system of forced labor and sharecropping peonage across the U.S. south — one of the major pillars of U.S. capitalism and a major source of revolutionary potential — all that was virtually a closed book to the socialists of the U.S.

And there were different shades of this: the “native-born” socialists who soon gave rise to the Browder school of communism, had a tendency to adopt the standard american view of black people (alternating between patronizing and raw white supremacy).

The immigrant socialists came with their home countries as a framework, and often were only distantly aware of the particularities of the U.S. — and at that time, very little was written or known about the truly monstrous conditions of Black people in the south. and, as happens when people don’t grasp the particularities of a situation, they often fell back on abstractions, or notions of how thing should be done, imported from some other time and place.

there were, in fact, major parallels between Black people and eastern Europe. Once radical Jewish immigrants actually understood the similarities between pogroms and lynchings (and between antisemitism russian-style and the hatred of Black people), they became (for many decades) a major ally of Black people, and an energetic force among communists for organizing in the ghettos and Black belt.

and it was valuable for the comintern to demand (literally demand) that the american socialists think of Black people as a “national question.” Until then, the socialist theory in the U.S. went little further than thinking that black and white should unite, and that black people should be integrated into the trade union movement (on the terms of that existing movement). But the idea that there was a whole system of national oppression to overthrow, and that Black people might create a powerful current (separate from “the workers movement”) that could undermine and help overtrhow American capitalism — that was rarely considered before stalin and the comintern congresses of the 1920s. (Lenin made a brief passing reference to Black people and Indians as nationalities internal to the U.S. in his remarks to the early 1920s Congresses.)

So this is a complex process: Mao spoke movingly about how the salvoes of the russian revolution brought marxism (and marxism-leninism) to the people of the world. and this is profoundly true. Marxism had been a rather parochial european movement before the russian revolution — and truly became an International for the first time.

But at the same time there was a codification, and this became more problematic as time passed — when Marxism itself in the soviet union became codified in ways increasingly used to legitimized whatever the momentary policy was. And as the international movement (unfortunately) came to be seen, increasingly, as something in the service of protecting the Soviet Union (and therefore subordinate to Soviet state policies at each point).

One of the accompanying problems was the decision (in the third period of the comintern, and in the struggle against Bukharin in the USSR and Lovestone in the USA) to focus on equating “American exceptionalism” with revisionism. any notion of investigating the PARTICULARITIES of countries was made suspect among communists — and equated with resistance to “bolshevization” and with non-revolutionary pessimism. so if you wanted to deeply investigate the dynamics of the U.S. (which is a rather large, complex and unique country) you were saddled with this charge of “American exceptionalism” — and, as a result, the Marxism that emerged was particularly formulaic, rigid, obedience. And as the American communists accomodated themselves to the American landscape (which the inevitably had to do) it was on the basis of adopting rather naked bourgeois democratic and patriotic notions right out of mainstream politics (not on the basis of a revolutionary communist analysis of this place and that time).

So, in passing, i think it is rather silly for Carl to argue that since harry haywood and some other “black bolsheviks” attended the comintern meetings, that this shows it was a living analysis of U.S. conditions. gee, what a simple test! In fact it was highly contradictory: it was an advance over the previous indifferent-or-racist policies of earlier U.S. socialists, but it was a mechanical and primitive attempt to apply marxism to those conditions (and were quickly abandoned).

Let me just say that haywood’s work was always a terrible mix of dogmatism and self-promotion. In his book (black bolshevik) he makes himself out to be much more of a player in the process by which these lines were developed — for reasons that are easy to see, but which have little credibility.

When in the 1950s, Harry Haywood tried to help resurrect those Comintern resolutions (which he was closely identified with), it was doubly mechanical. Since the problems of Black liberation were taking radical new turns, and the question of “self-determination” (and independence) was never to emerge as the central one. And the radical left forces of the Haywood type were never able to comprehend or influence the emerging civil rights movement.

Then it became DOUBLY mechanical, when (in the 1970s) some forces tried to resurrect Haywood’s work as a solution to the problems of the 60s — the theory of 1912, squeezed through a dogmatic press in 1950, was suddenly offered as the solution to the mounting dilemmas of Black Liberation in the 1970s. It was a terrible turn — and the fixation with 1928 comintern documents swept over once revolutionary currents (like BWC, and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, formerly Young Lords Party) and helped accellerate their decline into shriveled dogmatic cinders.

Let’s put it like this:

There were in the 1930s people who thought that they could solve major theoretical problems by slavishly adhering to scripts written (supposedly) on the basis of taking the bolsheviks as a model. (The awful book “History of the CPSU(B)” was central to that process by the late 1930s.)

Then there arose (within the revolutionary movement of the 1960s) people who called on communists to solve the problems of those times by resurrecting the communist politics of the 1930s — either the revolutionary politics of the early 30s, or the reformist/liberal CP politics of the later thirties and CIO drives. There was Leibel Bergman inside the RU/RCP, and the Klonsky’s who led the October League, Nelson Perry of the CLP (who preferred the CP of the late forties) and Harry Haywood hanging around promoting himself and his theories.

But this method of approaching problems was a mini-disaster.

The Black Liberation struggle of the 1960s arose out of conditions radically different from what the Comintern was examining in 1928 — and the methods that were already mechanical in 1928 were bizarrely out of step and out of time by 1970. (Avakian’s early work “Living Socialism vs. Dead Dogma” blew the covers off of that — in a very initial way, that however didn’t dig into the roots in method and theory within the comintern itself.)

So for us now, to promote a Harry Haywood as a lesson or a symbol or a theoretical model for now is exactly wrong. His work and legacy is dogmatism and mechanical thinking. This was true in 1928 (when it was at least an advance), it was terribly true in 1950s (when dogmatic thinking was an impotent response to browderism), and it was positively ridiculous by the 1970s, when some utterly uncreative forces tried to promote him and his work, as the Black Liberation Movement started to stumble and sink.

I don’t think that now (a full thirty years later) we should resurrect all this — as a theory, as a model or as a legacy. I suggest people study it, as a way of understanding what the conditions of Black people once were, and as a cautionary tale of how marxism can be a mechanical religious approach, not a scientific one.